backflipped right into my heart
by arahir
Summary: Matt bears witness to the greatest tragedy of the modern age. / Shiro is staring at the kid, open-mouthed, and there's not a trace of humor in it. "Parkour?" Shiro asks, managing to sound fascinated. The kid brushes the bangs out of his eyes, suave-like. "Yeah. Parkour."
1. Chapter 1

_Dear Katie,_

 _I witnessed a tragedy today._

* * *

They're the only two in the Garrison gym when the kid walks in.

Matt is reading on one of the suspiciously sticky benches by the door, supposedly spotting for Shiro who's busy dead lifting some ridiculous amount of weight for god knows what reason. It's not like sitting in a cockpit requires you to be shredded, but if he's dumb enough to actively seek out pain, Matt's not going to let him go it alone. At least if he accidentally traps himself under a weight, Matt will be there to laugh.

They're an hour into it when the doors slide open. It's after curfew and Shiro has special permission to use the gym, so visitors aren't exactly common. The kid looks normal at first, if unfamiliar. He's out of uniform and dressed down in clothes that are almost aggressively plain, but he's—pretty, even at a passing glance.

The kid gets two steps into the room before he realizes it's not empty.

Matt is watching, so Matt can pinpoint the exact moment the kid's life falls apart—the exact moment _all_ of their lives fall apart.

* * *

 _And Katie, I'm not joking, he took one look at Shiro and his heart stopped. Right there in front of me. I thought I was going to have to do CPR._

* * *

The kid's eyes settle on Shiro, where he's busy being sweaty and gross, and go shock-wide.

It's like his primary motor function ceases for a second. He stumbles, almost, _almost_ catches his feet, but his momentum carries him forward, right over the glorified Bowflex that no one's seen anyone but Iverson use, and down he goes.

It's... tragic.

He doesn't fall so much as crash face first right into the floor and the small heap of single-hand dumbbells piled there. He gives a little, pained cry, the sound drawing Shiro's attention. The kid has solid reflexes; he's up almost as soon as he's down, but the damage is done.

And he doesn't notice his foot is hooked under one of the dumbbells.

He tries to take a step and stumbles again—Shiro and Matt both put out a hand like they can stop his second fall by sheer force of will, but by some fluke, by some stroke of luck, by the grace of some angel, he doesn't fall.

It's a pure accident. Matt can tell by the surprise on his face. The kid's hands land just right, and his momentum is _just_ enough that he turns it into the most haphazard somersault Matt's ever seen in his entire life. It's not smooth by any definition, but it's maybe a little impressive.

He stands and dusts himself off, looks in the general direction of the wall over Shiro's shoulder, face already as red as is possible for a human, and says, "I'm fine. It was—parkour."

He's dead serious.

Matt feels his mouth fall open. For a second he thinks he's misheard, because it's the most flagrant lie he's ever heard in his life, and the most bizarre. He glances at Shiro, hoping they can share a raised eyebrow and a _get a load of this kid_ look, but Shiro isn't looking at him.

Shiro is staring at the kid, open-mouthed, and there's not a trace of humor in it.

"Parkour?" Shiro asks, managing to sound fascinated.

"Yeah." The kid brushes the bangs out of his eyes, suave-like. "Parkour."

* * *

 _Katie. This kid has never done parkour in his life. He wouldn't know parkour if it did a back flip off a building and suplexed him in an alley._

* * *

They chew on that revelation for a half second. Shiro and the kid are making the kind of intense eye contact that's physically agonizing to bare witness to as a third party.

It makes sense, in some kind of world, Matt decides, distantly. Shiro is almost two hundred pounds of glistening muscle in a muscle tank. The undercut, the jawline—he's hot. There's nothing weird about the kid's reaction, and the kid is, at second glance, more than passingly pretty. He's almost pulling off the shag cut, and his eyes are the kind of big and blue that's made the career of teen heart-throbs innumerable.

Somewhere in the distance, Peter Gabriel starts playing.

That's the last moment anything in Matt's life makes sense, the last moment he has any grasp on the reality he's become accustomed to, because at that exact moment the kid's nose starts bleeding, profusely, dripping right down his chin, and that's the moment Shiro ceases to be a functioning human.

"Oh my god—" Shiro glances around in a panic. There are kleenexes on the table by the door, but before Matt can point that out, Shiro settles on the very obvious and logical solution of pulling off his tank and shoving it under the kid's nose.

Of course.

The kid's eyes go big, _big,_ because Shiro is half naked and pressing sweaty tank top into his nose, and then flutter shut. Shiro misinterprets, thinks the kid is about to faint, and wraps an arm around his back.

"Breathe through your mouth. We—we should get you to the infirmary," he says gently, cupping the back of the kid's head in his hand, digging his fingers into the kid's black hair with more enthusiasm than is strictly required.

None of this is required.

The kid shakes his head faintly. "I'll be fine," he says, though it comes out muffled and mostly unintelligible.

There's a horrible moment where they're both staring into each other's eyes, not talking, not moving. Matt closes his book absently, something foreboding looming in the back of his mind, something ominous stalking through the room—

No. No fucking way. Shiro is blushing.

Shiro is _blushing_.

* * *

 _Anyway, the secondhand embarrassment almost killed me right then and there._

 _I wish it had._

* * *

"Really, I'll be fine," the kid says for the fourth time from his seat on the bench, while Shiro hovers above him.

He still has Shiro's shirt clutched against his face though it's been minutes and Matt knows for a fact he's not bleeding anymore. His eyes are glued to Shiro's chest, but Shiro is oblivious somehow. Probably because he's equally fascinated with whatever is going on with the kid's hair. What a pair.

The kid buries his nose deeper in the shirt, eyes still laser focused on Shiro's pecs. _God_.

"I'm sorry, again—" Shiro starts.

"No, I should have watched where I was going. I didn't expect to see anyone," the kid says to Shiro's chest. He's still staring, and it's bald, blatant—Matt feels debased by proximity.

"So..." Matt says, when they've been silent too long and he can feel his sanity slipping. "Are you new? I don't think I've seen you around before."

The kid nods. "I just transferred." Good. Good, that's easy. They can work with that. Matt smiles at the kid and then shoots Shiro a Look, because this is his opening to ask the kid's name or have anything approaching a normal interaction.

Shiro returns his glance with a deer in the headlights look of his own. There's a bare pause where he's visibly trying to come up with something, anything to say to the kid.

 _Ask his name,_ Matt mouths, but Shiro is back to staring at the top of the kid's head.

"So... You do parkour?" Shiro offers, like a man adrift at sea clinging to his only lifeline.

The kid's eyes dart around, glancing off Shiro's chest and face, resettling on the wall behind him. "Oh, y-yeah," he stutters. He actually _stutters._ "Parkour. It's—great."

Matt closes his eyes and embraces the abyss.

* * *

 _And then Shiro is like, oh, yeah,_ parkour _, I love parkour._

 _Neither of them know anything about parkour!_

* * *

"Wow," Shiro mutters to himself for the third time.

They're walking back from the gym, and Matt is slowly dying.

At least Shiro has his shirt back, but it's a double edged sword because it's _disgusting_ and covered in blood and he's caught Shiro staring down at it fondly twice already.

Un-fucking-believable.

"I mean, wow." Four times. He shakes his head, smiling to himself. "Parkour," Shiro says, rolling the R, and Matt's no expert but neither is Shiro and neither is that kid and that's definitely not how you pronounce it.

"Yep," Matt says. "Par _kour_ ," he enunciates it, like maybe that will help Shiro get it right or realize that it's not actually parkour he's suddenly obsessed with.

"Do you know anyone that does parkour?"

Jesus Christ—

"Nope. I've never met anyone who did parkour in my entire life." The double-stuff layer of sarcasm flies right over Shiro's head, which should be impossible given he's currently floating somewhere on cloud nine. But Shiro just sighs and brushes his bangs to one side, smiling to himself.

"I mean—"

"Yeah, parkour, wow. Too bad you didn't get his name, huh." It's mean, but they share a bunk and there's no way he's going to sleep to the sound of Shiro whispering sweet parkour nothings to himself. That's not a life he can live.

Shiro comes to a dead stop right there in the hallway, like this has only just now occurred to him. Matt snaps out a hand and grabs his arm before he can run off and beg the kid for his name and number and star sign.

"Dude, you look like a murder scene. At least get a clean shirt." That'll work, and then he can wait until Shiro is in the bathroom and lock him in. Friends don't let friends run down hallways after hours trying to stalk down strange shirt-sniffing parkour boys.

There's a brief moment where Shiro is staring longingly down the hallway, as if he might go back anyway. It's—tragic. By any metric, this is a tragedy, unfolding right before his eyes.

* * *

 _So we got back to our room, and I seriously think there was a moment where he was considering not washing the shirt. I've never been so ashamed of anyone in my life. It's like I trusted him and then I found out he's one of those people that gets on a table and starts strip teasing after one beer. Except instead of beer his weakness is clumsy boys with blue eyes and bad hair. Man, you think you know someone._

 _I don't know how I can look him in the eye after this. I'll keep you updated, with regrets._

 _\- Matt_

 _PS. Montgomery let me rework the flight simulator programs today using Shiro's scores. I'm attaching the code if you want to check it out. Don't tell Dad._


	2. Chapter 2

_Dear Katie,_

 _It got worse. It got so much worse._

* * *

Everything is peachy-keen for a solid two days.

Shiro washes the bloody tank top and starts to regain some of Matt's respect and trust. They don't see any sign of Parkour Boy. Not in the mess, not in the halls, not in the library. It's a double edged blade, but if Shiro spends double the usual amount of time haunting the gym and an abnormal and disquieting share of his spare time staring out windows, that's fine. Everyone has their cross to bear.

Matt only catches him watching parkour videos on his phone once. The tinny dubstep is a dead give away, but maybe it'll help him figure out that real parkour doesn't actually involve that much tripping or blood or soulful gazing. (It doesn't involve... any of that.)

And then, two days after the Incident, Shiro gets a new fixation. They both do, because on Tuesday someone destroys the simulator.

* * *

 _Like, they didn't literally destroy it, but you know how Dad is always going off about Shiro's scores? Obliterated. Total fatality._

* * *

"You messed up the coding," Montgomery sighs.

 _No,_ Matt did not. And Katie checked it, so he's double, triple sure. They tweaked it to make it harder. Whoever this kid is, they're either a world class programmer with a lot of extra time and tech on their hands or they're not fully human.

"I'm sorry Sir, and I hope you don't think this is out of line, but we really did check it. I had Shiro test it four times. It should..." Matt lets his eyebrows quirk up in a look of gentle, innocent assurance. "It _should_ check out."

Montgomery sighs again. "Fine, Holt. We'll bring the cadet back in and retest him."

 _We'll bRing the caDet back in and reTeSt hiM_ , Matt mocks in his head.

"Sir, if you don't mind me asking—and I understand if you can't tell me—who was the cadet?"

"He's new," Montgomery says, and nothing else. Which is ominous at best, because new recruits aren't exactly popping up like daisies in the desert here. There's only one mid-year transfer Matt knows about.

No fucking way.

* * *

 _And instead of being like "...i'm gonna fuck this bitch up" Shiro was like "...i'm gonna straight up_ _fuck this bitch become good friends with this person whom I admire in a professional and respectful manner" (sorry, I forget you're thirteen sometimes)._

* * *

"Wait—really?" Shiro should be heart broken, or at least mildly peeved that someone dethroned him. No—not just dethroned him, but exiled him and his pathetic scores to any icy abyss. The whole fighter class, the whole _pilot_ class—hell, the entire Garrison is in disgrace, lost and wandering the wasteland this unnamed cadet has sent them to.

"Yeah. It was probably a fluke. They're going to retest him."

"Him?" Shiro asks, just a touch too canny.

Matt closes his eyes. That's right. Shiro isn't dumb. Shiro has very specific parkour-related blinders which are making it very hard to take him seriously right now, but he's not dumb.

"I don't know the details," Matt hedges.

Shiro grins. It's the Shiro Grin that means, specifically, _I am Iverson's favorite student and the Garrison's darling and you are weak like a baby, watch this_. "No problem."

* * *

 _Yeah, well, guess what. It was a big fucking problem._

* * *

Whatever Shiro does to get the file from Iverson, he spends the next forty-eight hours married to it.

It's one of those grey and orange file-folders that the Garrison had specially made to order. They probably cot $10 a pop, and god speed soldier—there's no way they're going to be able to salvage this one once Shiro's done with it. He keeps poring over it like it's the key to uncovering the meaning of life. He even falls asleep with it once, to Matt's utter disgust.

That second day Matt's had enough. He snatches it out of Shiro's hands over dinner in the mess, so at least he can get a look at it before Shiro's grubby ketchup fingerprints make it totally illegible.

It's not at all what he expects it to be.

It's—blank. The file is almost completely bare but for three lines of script, one of which is partially redacted:

 _Keith_

 _FPC 125-67-876_

 _DOB: 2096-10-23_

There's no photo, no last name, no scores except for the recent total annihilation of the simulator. Almost every other slot on the page is blank—not redacted, but never filled in at all.

"What is this?"

"I know," Shiro says, bright eyes on the edge of mania. "It's a _mystery_ —"

"No," corrects Matt. "Have you seriously been making out with a three line file for the past two days? What have you been doing with it?"

Shiro puts on a look of delicate confusion. "I was—considering the possibilities."

This is maybe the only time in either of their lives—in any one's life, ever, in the history of man, that _considering the possibilities_ has been used as an innuendo for delicately caressing a sheet of paper.

Matt flips it over—nothing on the back either—and hands it back. Shiro takes it with loving care, staring down at it like he hasn't memorized every pixel and stray ink blot. This isn't healthy.

"Look," Matt tries to sound gentle, "there's a chance this isn't who you think it is. Just don't get your hopes up, ok?" (If it is, Matt will set himself on fire, end it on his own terms, go out with some dignity.)

But the light in Shiro's eyes dims at that, and suddenly Matt feels like a dick. Takashi Shirogane has been his best friend through three years of the Garrison. He put up with Matt crying through two weeks of comms practicals last year. This is baby's first crush. Matt can afford to put up with him making moon eyes at a file folder.

"Hey... do you want to play some Samurai Cat Six? I got the new DLC," Matt tries for a distraction.

It works, and they make it a whole twenty minutes before he hears Shiro mutter to himself, "Is October Scorpio or Libra?"

* * *

 _Three guesses who showed up to the retest, and the first two don't count. None of them count. Nothing matters anymore._

* * *

The day of the retest dawns like every day before it, and there's no indication it's going to be the first day of the dumbest and worst part of Matt's life until he's neck deep in it, standing with Shiro and Montgomery outside the simulator, waiting for their mystery cadet to show.

Iverson opens the door and turns aside, letting the cadet behind him step into view. An aura of overwhelming darkness falls across the room, but only Matt senses it. For Shiro, it probably translates as a soft breeze, a rain of flower petals, and soft piano music.

It's Parkour Boy.

He's not immediately recognizable, because he's not covered in blood and haloed in his own regret and embarrassment. He's got his Galaxy Garrison cadet uniform on, complete with the boots, belt, and the jaunty beret no one actually wears. It's a devastating combination; Matt doesn't have to look at Shiro to know what expression he's making, but he does anyway.

The stars and moon are hanging in his eyes. His grin is sitting in the uncomfortable no-man's land between wild and sweet. It's the look of a man who has received everything he ever wanted in one small, blue-eyed, uniform-wrapped package.

* * *

 _Anyway, Shiro has a uniform kink, so jot that down. Don't Google it. Just absorb that knowledge and judge him for it the next time you see him._

* * *

Introductions are... horrible.

They stutter over their own names, and then each other's, and by the end of it even Iverson and Montgomery are looking askance. Not because relationships between students are banned, but because the second hand embarrassment is—once again—crippling.

It gets worse after the test, which goes horrifyingly well. Shiro sits copilot, ostensibly to double check his flying, though Matt figures it's hard for Shiro to do that while he's busy mentally recasting himself as Jasmine and Keith as Aladdin in their own private _A Whole New World_ sequence.

But it goes well. Montgomery watches the feed rapt, the score climbing and climbing. It tests reflexes, spatial awareness, how well a pilot can adapt, how well they can analyze a situation and react—it's brutal.

There's nothing wrong with the programming. The kid is flat-out incredible.

When it's over the two of them come out of the simulator breathing hard. Keith has a reason—Shiro doesn't. Matt gives him a look that says, he hopes, _I see you, and were it not for the laws of this land and your three years of service in this friendship, I would drag you right here and now_.

Shiro meets his eyes and has the good grace to look chagrined, at least. It's almost sweet. Cool, competent Shiro, brought low by _this_.

This is... Matt tries to look at it objectively. A wunderkind pilot who's transferred mid-year with a blank file, who hasn't been spotted in the mess for lunch in three days and whose first meeting with what he must have learned is the top pilot at the Garrison involved him tripping twice and bleeding all over said pilot's shirt. This kid has had a tough week; none of this is his fault.

Except for the shirt sniffing. That's inexcusable.

They're all fawning over him now, and he's visibly uncomfortable with the attention. Matt makes eye contact-and yeah. He's on the verge of panic. Matt opens his mouth to say something, anything, to get the focus off this impending train wreck of a boy, but Shiro beats him to the punch.

"You know, Keith does sports, too. We met in the gym the other day..."

* * *

 _If I could have, I would have stopped time._

* * *

It's the worst possible thing he could have said. Matt sees the writing on the wall and shoots Shiro a panicked look, waving his hands in the universal gesture of _NO NO STOP NO_. He sees the kid come to same realization and go shock-white, but it's too late. Shiro is a single-minded, inexorable force of nature and bad decision making.

"...He does parkour," Shiro says with pride, somehow.

"Oh?" Iverson says, with the bare minimum of required interest. He wants pilots, not parkourists.

No one wants parkourists, Matt thinks faintly. Shiro is unique among mankind.

Every eye in the room turns on the kid and the kid... isn't breathing. That's the color skin goes after three days in the morgue. He honestly looks like he might pass out.

"Well. Maybe he can show us a thing or two," Iverson says lamely, in the voice of someone who doesn't want to talk about something any longer than is strictly required by social norms.

Shiro's smile falters when he catches the look on Keith's face. It's heartbreaking, and exactly what he deserves. Matt prays he'll be fast enough to catch him if he falls over—no one deserves to have that happen in front of their crush twice—but he takes a breath, finally, and seems to get some color back in his cheeks.

And then Montgomery ruins everything.

"We need another peer tutor for the physical agility classes. I'll have you come in and test for it next week," Montgomery says off-hand. "Can you do a back flip?"

It's the last nail in the coffin lid, the cumulative result of the manufactured G forces from the simulation, Shiro's constant close presence, and his utter terror. He goes white again and lists dangerously.

"Keith?" Shiro asks, in the least professional way possible, putting out a hand like he might have to catch him, too eager by half.

But he doesn't fall. He steadies himself, takes a deep breath, and glances up at Shiro through his lashes. "S-Sorry. I'm fine, Sir."

Shiro isn't a _Sir_ , but he goes bright red anyway.

Absolutely everyone notices, and there's no way to misinterpret that. It's suddenly intolerable to be in the same room with this. This isn't even a train wreck—it's a three alarm fire, it's the Enterprise crashing into the San Francisco Bay, it's galaxies of embarrassment colliding and birthing new stars.

Iverson and Montgomery clear their throats in tandem, and then Iverson is dragging the Cadet off to "get some fresh air" and Montgomery doesn't say a word before he follows them. Fresh air. Right.

 _God, I wish that were me._

"I'll be in the mess, whenever you're done with... whatever this is," Matt says, when he can muster the courage to look at Shiro.

Shiro nods, imperceptibly, still staring after Keith, and still blushing.

* * *

 _Anyway. It's the worst thing I've ever seen happen to a person. I never thought I'd say this, but poor Parkour Boy. Do you think we could send him flowers or something?_

 _No. Never mind. Shiro would get jealous._

 _Thanks again for helping with that program. Tell everyone I miss them. Tell Dad Shiro is permanently uninvited from all family functions._

 _\- Matt_

 _PS. I'm joking, please don't tell Dad that._


	3. Chapter 3

_Dear Katie,_

 _I'm disowning you._

* * *

Matt doesn't talk to Shiro for a full twenty four hours. Not because he's mad, but because he can't look at Shiro without his bright eyes and his red face and Keith's soft little _Sir_ playing on loop in his mind.

It's like an intrusive thought, but instead of something innocuous like wanting to drop his phone off the side of the Garrison, he wants to jam his head against the wall until the memory is gone or he sustains permanent brain damage.

He's about thirty seconds from giving in when the door to their room slams open—actually slams—and Shiro flings himself inside.

"Someone sent him _flowers_ ," he moans in absolute agony. Shiro should be at lunch, far away from Matt, which means he actually hunted Matt down in their rooms to cry about this, which—

"Wait, what? Flowers?" Matt asks, because it rings a bell in the worst way.

"I knew this would happen," Shiro mutters, not listening. "He's got that hair and the legs and the accent..."

Keith has at least two of those things, but so do most people, and there's no way two people at the Garrison have been bewitched by that hair. It's not statistically possible. "How did they send him flowers all the way out here? How did you even find out?"

Shiro flops down on his bed and pulls his pillow over his face in a fair imitation of a distraught teen girl. "Iverson," he says into the cloth, followed by something long and moaning that Matt can't make out, which is probably for the best.

"Iverson told you?" It's hard to imagine him willingly playing any part in this train wreck. "Why?"

"Roses," Shiro mutters, still not listening. It's great. "I should have thought of it first. Red ones, _god,_ how does that even—"

He rips away the pillow for dramatic effect. "I knew this would happen. I knew it. Who can afford to get flowers shipped out here? You don't think it was—" Shiro's face goes striking pallid, "—Montgomery?"

Uh... "Why would you even think that? Why would _anyone_ think that?"

"There was a card with them. That's why Iverson called me in. He thought I sent them, because there wasn't a name on the card. It just said—"

From across the room, Matt sees his lips start to form the first syllable of the word he would give anything to never hear again for the rest of his life. Anything. His vision goes tunnel on Shiro's mouth, the word coming out in distorted slow motion.

"— _y_."

It echoes in Matt's ears, endlessly.

 _Parkour Boy._

There's an obvious explanation, only one person who would willingly do this—aside from Shiro, who doesn't count anymore where fake parkour or boys are concerned—and the answer is glaring at him from where his laptop is still open on his desk.

* * *

 _Did you honestly think you could send flowers addressed to Parkour Boy and they would get to him?_

 _Katie, what the fuck._

* * *

Matt has to clear his throat, and then clear it again before he can even start to form words. "They—they called you in to the office?"

"Yeah." His voice doesn't crack, but there's a bone-deep sorrow there that hurts to hear secondhand. "Iverson didn't want to deal with it. He was upset. But... it wasn't me." He says it like a man who has nothing left to live for.

Matt makes himself take a deep breath, but he can't draw his eyes from his open laptop and the half-typed email sitting there, glaring up at him.

Katie is dead. She's dead.

* * *

 _It's not funny Katie! Roses? Mom is taking it out of my account! The shipping, Katie. The shipping alone. I can't believe this._

* * *

The roof is a nice place to hang out. It's even nicer when your roommate is busy lying face down in bed after having revealed his uniform kink and authority kink to two senior officers, one of which is the director of the military academy, only to have the object of his affection snatched out from under him. It's Shakespearean, somehow. Or at least, Shiro seems to think so.

 _Iverson's favorite student my ass._

No one wants to be in the room with that. Matt just hopes he isn't tainted by association now.

His solace is interrupted by a sound like a sack of potatoes hitting the other side of the wall he's leaned against, followed by a soft little _oomph_ of pain.

And there's a moment, a beat, where he could walk away and not round the corner, but curiosity gets the better of him.

The first thing he sees is the kid, dressed as he was the first day they saw him. As Matt watches, he runs at the wall and jumps. The intended result isn't immediately apparent, because he goes barreling straight into it in a way that hurts just to watch-but what else did he expect?

"Are you ok?" Matt ventures, against his better judgment and logic.

The kid rolls over from his prone position and stares up at Matt, dazed for a moment, and then he leaps up in one relatively smooth motion.

But then, when you've just run headfirst into a wall, everything is smooth by comparison.

"You're Shiro's friend," he whispers, like Matt is the priest of a holy order centered on the worship of Shiro's biceps.

Shiro's friend. He's not sure that's what he wants to be today, but he nods out of some remnant sense of loyalty. The kid clams up, glancing around. "I was just—" he waves at the wall, "—you know."

No, Matt does not. The kid sniffs and wipes his nose, and god, please let him not have a bloody nose again.

"Parkour," he says.

 _Par_ -fucking- _kour_. The absolute gall. The balls on this kid, that he would go all in on the worst, most needless lie ever told on Garrison property. Enough is enough.

"No. You can't just—no. That's not parkour." It feels so freeing to say it, like a weight off his chest. He repeats it, just to hear someone say it again. "That's not parkour. _You don't know parkour_."

It comes out almost gleeful.

The kid crosses his arms and eyes him with a look that's trying very hard to be offended, but then he looks away, off into the sunset. It lights up his whole face in dramatic relief. The roses, Matt notices, are sitting by the wall, wilting already because the kid hasn't put them in water, and there's something about the entire tableau, like he's been dropped in at halfway point of a bad teen movie he doesn't want to have any part in.

"I..." The kid swallows, wraps his arms around himself tighter. "...I don't actually know parkour," he admits, with all the seriousness of someone who's just confessed to committing a felony.

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Matt takes the highest of high roads and doesn't crow about it, though it's a near thing. "Why were you trying to make out with the wall then?"

The kid goes sheepish, and it somehow makes him look—adorable. Even to Matt's eyes. His mouth pouts, his hair falls in his eyes, and Shiro can never see that look. Never. It'll ruin him for real and for good. "I was trying to do a kick flip."

"...You know that's a skateboarding thing, right?"

"Oh."

What Matt learns over the course of the next hour is that the kid-Keith-is fucking terrifying. He's single minded, capable, and completely disgusting in every way; his cuteness is a patina, a facade, encompassing a sweaty boy obsessed with three things: piloting, and an entire category of stuff that Matt mentally labels _exercise_ and shoves into a box, and hover bikes—

"Wait, you own a bike?"

The kid nods shyly.

No, that's—no. Shiro can never know that. Never. What it comes down to is this: Shiro is a very beefy keg of gunpowder turned to mortal flesh, and this boy, Keith, is three alarm fire _._

* * *

 _So basically they're meant to be. They deserve each other. But you know what? I don't deserve any of this. Friendship ended with Katie and Shiro, now Parkour Cryptid is my new best friend._

 _I hate you both._

 _\- Matt_

 _PS. You owe me $200 for those flowers. I didn't tell Mom, but you owe me._


	4. Chapter 4

_Dear Katie,_

 _I forgive you. I'm leaving you all my worldly possessions. This is my last letter._

* * *

"Look, don't take this wrong, but I don't think this back flip thing is going to work out."

Keith shoots him one of those looks that means, _I've heard what you said and I know you're right, but I'm going to keep throwing myself at this wall until I break or it does_.

It's been three days of this. Three days of Keith trying and failing to do a back flip, because it turns out Montgomery was serious and he actually does want to bring Keith in to test him. Three days of Matt avoiding Shiro, again, because the first day Post Rosegate steeled something in him. Instead of moping in their room, Shiro has been stalking around the Garrison like he'll be able to smell the parkour affinity and missing $200 on someone.

He can never find out that it was technically Matt. There's a whole list of things he can't find out, and this is near the top, after the bike and the flowers and the soft sound Keith makes when he collides with something harder than him.

The roses are still on the roof, propped against the wall, desiccated beyond salvaging and it makes a sad sort of sense. There's no way walking around with a dozen red roses was going to help Keith's situation. It goes against his aesthetic, which at a passing glance is very stoic loner with a tragic backstory. The addition of roses and a cadet uniform transforms him into the member of a host club—it's fatal.

Keith winds up for another run at the wall. Matt doesn't look up, but hunches his shoulders on instinct, in anticipation of another round of secondhand agony.

There's a thump as Keith collides with the wall, almost the exact same way he has every single time before this; Matt flinches back. It's getting harder and harder to watch. At this point, Matt is there solely because someone is going to have to alert the medical staff to come scrape what's left of Keith off the roof when the wall finally wins.

"Almost had it," Keith coughs and rolls over. Matt lets himself make eye contact and immediately regrets it. A line of blood snakes its way down Keith's chin from his nose. Disgusting, in every way. "Oh, shit," Keith mutters, and covers his nose with one gloved hand—and god, those gloves are beyond redemption. Matt tosses him the pack of kleenex in from his bag without a word.

This can't go on.

* * *

 _Anyway. He's going to die, and I can't decide which is worse: Shiro in mourning for the rest of his life, or seeing them in the same room again._

* * *

"I have a plan," Shiro says that evening. He sounds self assured, cool and calm, like he hasn't sounded in days.

 _Don't ask, don't ask_ —

"What plan?"

Shiro crosses his legs like the villain in a bad action flick. "You'll see."

Matt rolls his eyes. "That's ominous. Does it have anything to do with—Keith?" He holds back a wince. _Keith._ It's a name that invokes flannel and mustaches, greasy hair and a roadside diner aesthetic—not doe eyes and miles of leg. Saying it out loud takes something out of him, every time.

Shiro goes red around the ears and gives the vaguest roll of his shoulder, which is a yes by any and every definition.

* * *

 _I should have seen it coming. You would have. Oh, yeah, we're just bringing the cadet in to test him. No big deal._

 _I want to die. I've truly never been closer to death in my life, Katie._

* * *

It doesn't make sense until Iverson calls him in to the office the next day.

He gets the summons while he's chin-deep in a bowl of mac and cheese. It's the one tolerable meal they get at the Garrison. Shiro is on his third bowl, miles ahead of Matt in their unofficial eating contest.

The gopher cadet stops by their table and pulls up short when he sets eyes on Shiro. He's got slick brown hair and a nice smile and either he's in love with Shiro or he's never seen anyone eat mac and cheese like they're in a back alley at 2am and the mac and cheese just handed them fifty bucks.

Matt would pay good money to see Shiro choose between unlimited mac and cheese and Keith—and that's what this has brought him to.

"Uh, Holt? Iverson wants to see you," the cadet stutters, eyes still fixated on Shiro and the spoon he's licking clean. He's going to go back for another bite; the spoon is going to get dirty again. It's totally unnecessary, like almost everything Shiro does. That's his skill: he makes it look like he needs to lift eighty pounds of dead weight, like that's required and not an act of total vanity.

Matt downs the rest of his mac and cheese like it's a shot and stands. A summons to Iverson's office might scare a mere mortal, but Matt is beyond life and death. "Yeah, I'm going."

It's a short walk. Matt doesn't let himself consider the possibilities. An honorable discharge would almost be a blessing.

When he gets to the office, the door is already open. Iverson is seated at his desk, staring down at a stack of papers like they're his last will and testament.

That's... not good.

He looks up as Matt walks in and motions to the chair across from his desk. Matt takes the seat, feeling like a patient about to get a fatal diagnosis.

Iverson stares at him for a moment. "Holt... Any changes to your team assignment require the approval of the entire team." He motions down to the stack of papers.

Matt feels faint.

"You're getting a new pilot, if you approve it."

That's the last thing he expects, and also the first. "Why? Shiro is the best pilot—"

"You're getting a _second_ pilot," Iverson clarifies, fatally, and that doesn't even make sense, but it _does._ In no reality is it ok, but Matt left reality behind several days ago.

"Who?" But he doesn't really need to ask.

"Keith."

Of course. Because this is where it was always heading. Shiro meets parkour boy. Shiro discovers parkour boy is an ace pilot. Shiro clings to parkour boy ace pilot with every fiber of his being. Shiro pulls every stop to spend every waking moment with parkour boy ace pilot.

"...Permission to speak freely, sir?"

Iverson closes his eyes like he's really not sure if anything is worth it anymore but is one hundred percent sure that letting Matt speak will be the biggest mistake of his life. He nods, finally.

"Sir, why?" Matt asks it like a dying man. Like a man who's just been shoved over the side of a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific, because that's exactly what he is.

 _Why are you letting this happen? Why are you doing this? What is Shiro using to blackmail you?_

Matt's holding out a hand in the dark, and it's Iverson's choice to take it, or not. He almost wants to add: _If it's blackmail, I can help. Let me help._

Iverson puts his head in his hand and breathes in and out with audible pain. "Cadet, do you know about Schrodinger's Cat?"

Matt's offended. It's the kind of question someone with a high school education in physics would ask, thinking they knew anything. _Schrodinger's Cat_. Pathetic.

He doesn't roll his eyes, only because if he does they'll roll so far back that he'll be able to see his own brain cells dying. "I think so, sir."

"I've been in this business for a long time. I've seen—things. Some things I regret seeing. _Many_ things I regret seeing. Did you know, I once caught Mont—" he stops himself, shaking his head, and great. Matt is his personal counselor now. Maybe Iverson will start talking about his dreams—if he does, Matt will walk out. There's a baseline level of self respect you have to hold yourself to to get through life and this is his.

"Never mind. My point is this: Shirogane and that cadet? They're my cat. The two best pilots we've got." He shakes his head again, and Matt notices for the first time that the decorative bottle of whisky in the cabinet behind his desk is half empty.

"As long as they can fly, I don't want to know anything else. Not one word, not one look. They're my cat, and I'm locking them in a box."

It's containment, Matt realizes. The last tactic of great commanders from the beginning of time: if you can't destroy it, contain it.

"I'm the box," Matt says faintly.

Iverson doesn't meet his eyes, but he nods, soul-weary.

"What makes you think I'll agree to this?" It's the ultimate power move, and Iverson knows it.

He scrubs a hand over his eyes. "What do you want, Holt?"

"I..." _This is your moment. Don't fuck it up._ "...I want a TV." Iverson nods, incredibly.

"And unlimited internet access?" Matt tries.

Iverson nods again.

" _Without_ filters."

Iverson grimaces. "Fine."

Matt is drunk on power. There's only one way this is going, and if he's going to have to live in a world where he gets sexiled out of his own room because Shiro wants to get down with a sweaty, disgusting jock wonder, Matt's going to get everything he wants.

"And a dog." Check and mate.

Iverson squints at him. "No."

"But—"

"No.

* * *

 _It was worth a shot._

 _Anyway, I'll be forwarding my things to you. They're going to meet tomorrow and I think the shock of it will kill one or both of them._

 _I'm dead, either way._

 _\- Matt_

 _PS. Tell Rover I loved him more than anyone or anything else. He's a hero among dogs._


	5. Chapter 5

_Hi Mom!_

 _Everything is great here._

* * *

"What I don't understand is how." Montgomery is on the edge of yelling. "You have two pilots." He counts them out on his fingers and stares at his hand for a moment in utter bafflement. " _Two_. And still—"

He gestures to the screen where it's replaying their wreck in livid technicolor for everyone to see. The simulator can project a little image of the ship in three dimensional space, and it's purely mocking.

The ship is flying steady and well for the first, oh, twenty seconds, and then it starts to jerk around, and then it does a _flip_ , and Matt can pick out each moment with tragic precision.

"How do you steer a ship into a cliff with _two_ pilots?"

* * *

 _We got a new team member. He's great!_

 _Shiro really likes him._

* * *

"What I want to know is what you used to bribe Iverson. I know there had to be—"

Shiro picks some lint off his uniform. "I didn't. Keith is a transfer. He doesn't have a team. We're filling a void in him—" Shiro chokes and coughs, going red "—in _his life_."

Disgusting. "You're lying."

Shiro looks down at his hands, flexing and turning them over. He's getting good at a specific type of brooding that Matt's only ever read about before. Only in romance novels. It's like he thinks he's Mr. Darcy or something. Maybe Elizabeth? Either way, if Matt catches him standing on any windy cliffs, staring soulfully into the distance, he's going over.

"He's an orphan," Shiro says finally, voice tight.

That's... surprisingly tragic. Not even in a sarcastic way. "How?" Matt asks.

"You know," Shiro says, misinterpreting the question, "like Oliver."

Matt puts down his book and swivels the chair around to face him full on. "He's an orphan. Like _Oliver_."

Shiro nods at his hands, his ridiculous shock of bangs swinging with the motion.

What the fuck. "Why—like Oliver? Why isn't he just an orphan?"

"Because. You know—" Shiro motions vaguely to his eyes, and it takes Matt a second to realize that he's trying to make them big and pathetic, and then Shiro pulls the lapels of his unzipped uniform jacket closed over his chest, huddling in it, like he's trying to simulate a Dickensian winter in London. "He's sad."

Matt resists the urge to put his head in his hands, but only just. "He's not that sad. And that's not what I meant. What happened to his parents?"

Shiro shakes his head. "Iverson didn't say..." He looks down at his hands, _again_ , and his pain is either a complete fabrication or genuine and Matt's not sure which is worse. "Matt... He needs us. He's alone."

Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

"Ok. But some day you have to tell me what you bribed Iverson with."

* * *

 _He does parkour._

* * *

That evening, Matt does two things: he takes a shot of the whisky he claimed from Iverson's office, and then another—three things, actually—and then he grabs his spare tablet and heads to the roof.

Keith is there, of course, and he's not trying to kill himself for once, but he looks morose. Shiro is right—the revelation that he's an orphan does make him look a little sad. The hair looks less like a tragic attempt at style than baby's first and only hair cut.

God.

"Here. I got you something." Matt tosses him the tablet.

Keith catches it in mid-air, lightning fast, and then stares at it like it's booby trapped. "What is it?"

"It's a... computer?" Matt means to phrase it like a statement, but it comes out like a question the moment he realizes that Keith might really not know what it is.

And suddenly, all he can see is Keith in a little winter jacket and hat, out in the snow, bug-eyed and fluff-haired and computer-less.

"It's got internet. Unrestricted. You can look up some parkour stuff and—" _stop throwing yourself into a wall before you break your nose and Shiro goes on a revenge mission,_ "—figure out how to a back flip, or something."

Keith's eyes go even bigger, somehow, and a little bright.

"Thanks," he says, voice dropping to something low and course that would probably ruin Shiro's life if he ever heard it.

* * *

 _Our first flight went really well._

* * *

It turns out that two pilots is great in theory—and probably great in practice, too, but not if the pilots in question are Shiro and Keith.

It starts like this: Matt and Shiro walk into the locker room to get changed into their flight suits, and there's Keith.

Before that moment, there's hope. Optimism is a frail thing, but Matt's been clinging to it with both hands since he walked out of Iverson's office. It breaks free and flees as soon as the door swings open.

Keith is only halfway into his flight suit, which is better than naked, but not by much. Matt sees him first—the bare shoulder, shining and red from the shower, the pale skin, the dark edge of a bruise that must be from his ongoing fight with the wall—and contemplates turning around and slamming the door in Shiro's face before he can see.

Too late.

To his credit, Shiro doesn't make a sound. But what he does instead is almost as bad.

Keith glances back at them, over his shoulder, through his bangs, and Shiro stumbles and trips. Over a bench. It's a fair approximation of their first meeting reversed, and god, they're a match made in heaven.

 _I hope I go to hell_ , Matt thinks distantly.

"Hi," says Matt, stepping over Shiro's corpse, holding out his hand. "I know we met once before, but I'm Matt _._ " He hopes his eyes are saying what he can't give voice to—there's a version of events that Shiro knows and that version of events does not include his best friend hanging out with his crush on the roof.

Keith is too distracted to notice, busy staring at Shiro, horrified. "Is he ok? Sir-"

"Nope! He's fine!" Matt leans to the side, blocking Keith's view of Shiro. "Remember what I told you?" he grits out, under his breath.

"Oh, sorry," Keith whispers. "He hates being called that."

There's a way to make it through this alive. There has to be.

* * *

 _There was a little error with the simulator._

* * *

The flight goes wrong in many and profound ways. Matt thought he was prepared for whatever it could throw at him, but he realizes twenty seconds in that he's made a fatal error in his calculations.

Not his fault. None of his calculations included Keith. Or, to be precise, none of his calculations were prepared for _this_ Keith.

"I'm sorry, Sir, but I'm still not sure how—"

Shiro smiles down at him. "It's fine. Just hold them like this." Shiro sets his hands over Keith's on the controls and Keith inhales, sharp, before he settles into the seat further—into Shiro, who's leaning over him.

Oliver my ass, Matt thinks.

This is the box. This simulator, with Shiro and Keith and their carefully constructed fantasy that Keith isn't as good as or better at piloting than Shiro is.

"Like this?" Keith breathes.

Matt tunes them out and focuses on being both engineer _and_ comms spec, but then the mock ship jerks up and down, sharp enough to send his head spinning.

"Oops," mutters Keith. "Sorry. I'm just having trouble with the—"

"That's fine," Shiro says. It's muffled by the ear he's whispering in, and Matt wishes to god there was an emergency release that would vault him out of the ship. "Here. Have you ever done an Immelmann turn?"

Matt has. It's the only time he's ever thrown up in an aircraft. It's a dogfight move, and that's not what this is. It's like a pilot mating ritual and unnecessary in every way. "No, you guys, come on—"

Too late.

Evidently an Immelmann turn also requires you to have most of your copilot's head pressed back against your big, buff shoulder, and the only real wonder is that Shiro manages to hang on through it. Only because he's bracing himself on Keith's body.

Disgusting, Matt thinks, and vomits into the gear box.

He doesn't witness the actual moment of the crash, but when they all step out of the simulator, Shiro and Keith are wearing the same blush.

* * *

 _We had a lot of fun._

* * *

"How do you steer a ship into a cliff with two pilots?"

Montgomery glares at the three of them. He really will pull the cockpit footage if he has to, and there are some things you just can't see twice. Or once, even, come to that.

"It's my fault. I threw up in the—" Matt gestures at the entire simulator through the window, "—everything."

Dead silence, but the kind that's charged and means everyone in the room is trying to decide how much laughter and derision is socially appropriate.

A lot, as it turns out.

Keith's eyes go wide at the injustice, and hey—at least Matt has one ally here. "Sir, that's not true—"

Shiro reaches around Keith and slaps a hand over his mouth, silencing him. He doesn't want the footage pulled either. Again: good in theory, bad in practice, because his hand is big enough that he ends up grabbing most of Keith's head in the process and well. That's something Matt didn't need to know.

He needs a new list, he realizes, in addition to the list of things Shiro can't know about Keith. That list is gone; they deserve each other. This list is for Matt, and it's full of things he needs to forget. That's the first thing that's going on it: Shiro can cradle Keith's head in the palm of his hand.

Yeah, the universe can have that one back for free.

Shiro is grinning brightly at Montgomery— _situation normal, nothing to see here, we're all doing great, and how are you?_ Because the last thing they need is Montgomery pulling the cockpit feed and showing the entire advanced class exactly how they wrecked. Between his fingers, Keith looks like he's about to pass out.

Evidently Iverson clued him in on the Situation because Montgomery turns away from the pair—full body, so that he's facing the rest of the class and the wall in equal measure and not a bit of Shiro and Keith. "I don't think I need to tell you all, vomit is _not_ an approved lubricant," he sighs.

Of all the shots to take. Matt is so undeserving of this pain.

* * *

 _Give everyone my love! I can't wait to see you guys!_

 _\- Matthew_


	6. Chapter 6

_Katie,_

 _Shiro thought I was getting down with Keith._

* * *

Their ill-fated first flight gets around the Garrison by the end of the day. It's not a big place, and everyone likes to hear about a prodigy getting knocked down a peg. Even better when it's three.

The only plus side to being the Garrison laughing stock is the dozen or so lubricant packets that someone leaves scattered in front of their door, along with a pink sticky note with _Approved_ lovingly penned on it in curling font.

It's a consolation prize for years worth of lost dignity, but it's better than nothing.

Shiro sighs like it's a big deal—it isn't—and starts gathering them up. "I'm sorry, Matt. You shouldn't have to deal with this—" But then something in his brain must short circuit because he pauses mid-grab, staring down at the handful of packets with red on his cheeks, eyes going all soft. It's as pathetic as it is gross.

"Give me those," Matt snaps and grabs them, muttering, "Right in the hallway. Really Shiro?"

Shiro is quiet for a minute, still staring off down the hallway, mid-imagine spot. "Did you see that bruise on his back?" he asks, deadly soft.

 _Deadly soft?_

No—he's not staring into the middle distance. He's _glaring_. Takashi Shirogane doesn't glare. He gets exasperated, he rolls his eyes, sometimes he sighs, but he doesn't have a mean bone in his body—until this moment. He looks like he's going to murder the carpet in the hallway for the possibility that it might have once tripped Keith and bruised his perfect skin.

"It's probably all the—" Matt closes his eyes and swallows down the last little bit of dignity that's stopping his throat from making the word, but he can't do it, "—all the exercise, you know?"

Shiro glances at him, frowning. "Parkour? No, that doesn't make sense. He's too good to get hurt like that."

Matt squints at him, cocks his head to the side, and feels his mouth fall open. There aren't words for this kind of dumb. "Then... what..."

"Well, someone sent him those flowers—"

Ok, no. No, this isn't happening. This is Shiro recasting himself in Moulin Rouge and Keith is in no way Nicole Kidman. "Don't even joke about that. And you don't even know someone at the school sent those!"

Shiro has to good grace to blush, but he's not fooling anyone.

"Why would your mind automatically go—there instead of like, _oh, he's getting in fights_ or something?"

And Matt is a fool, because evidently it really hadn't occurred to Shiro. His eyes go rock hard and gleaming—like steel, and suddenly that metaphor makes horrifying amount of sense, but not in the context of

"You think he's getting beat up?" Shiro asks, still deadly soft.

Matt's known Keith for a week and he already knows, from the bottom of his heart, that Keith could take Shiro in a fight. Keith could take any of them. If Shiro can't see that, it's on him.

"No," he sighs and leaves Shiro there in the hall to contemplate his sins.

* * *

 _And he's still pronouncing parkour wrong. I don't get it. I feel like he's gaslighting me. Maybe you do roll the second R in parkour?_

 _Can you double check for me? I can't make myself search it. I'd lose a part of myself._

* * *

Sundays are half days, which means Matt can join Keith for his mid-morning parkour session, which ends up being less about parkour and more about teaching him to use the tablet.

There are a horrifying number of _How To Parkour_ videos that have nothing to do with parkour at all, but in the end, they find a simple guide to back flipping, and hey—baby steps.

The issue is that it looks, to Matt at least, like a lot can go wrong. Ideally, Keith would have a lawn or a gym mat or something more forgiving to land on than the hard cement of the Garrison's roof, which doubles as a hard-top for launches.

It's simple in theory. Jump, do something acrobatic that Matt's never seen or heard of but Keith nods at, and then—do a back flip.

"You have to remember—" says the boy in the video, dead serious despite the fact that he's wearing nothing but boxers, a hat, and a graphic t-shirt that says **_I DON'T SEE OBSTACLES—I SEE OPPORTUNITIES_** in impact bold letters with little silhouettes of men jumping off them, "—whatever you do, _don't lean your head back._ "

That's—ominous.

"And trust me," he says in his smooth Australian accent, as if anyone could fully trust someone who thinks snapbacks still qualify as clothing, "you _don't_ want to land on your face."

That sounds like logical, solid advice, but it's also horrifying in a very real and immediate sense—and Matt isn't even the one doing it. Maybe some things are worse second hand.

"Look," Matt offers in a last-ditch effort to prevent permanent damage being done to one or both of them, "why don't we just go down to the gym? You know, where there's safety equipment. Or maybe even someone that could help. Someone with big muscles." Keith's face goes red. "Someone like _Shir_ —"

"No! No, he... Keith's entire face changes in that moment. "I don't want him to know I lied."

It's the saddest look Matt's ever seen. Keith should be out in the rain, talking about how he cheated on Shiro the night before their wedding, and if he finds out, Keith is going to love the love of his—

No. Matt's not going to be drawn into the weird movie reenactment thing the two of them have going.

"I guarantee you he doesn't care. You can just lie and call it a—a special kind of back flip, or something. Ask him for help. He'd buy it. He'd _love_ to help."

Probably love it too much. Matt has a waking nightmare of Shiro's hands on Keith's torso, but it's still better than Keith killing himself.

Keith shakes his head. "He knows too much about parkour—" wrong, on every level, "—and I can do this." The determination in his voice is out of every critical sports movie believe-in-me moment. The rookie gets his chance to risk it all, prove it all...

Goddamn it.

Matt nods, and force a smile. "Ok. Ok, you can do this. I'll be here." He gives Keith two thumbs up.

Keith returns the smile and nods at him, stepping a few feet away. He hops on the balls of his feet and shakes out his hands, and it looks like the right thing to do. This is it. He's got this. Matt almost believes it, and for one golden moment, it looks like he's going to pull it off.

The jump, the follow through—he's a picture of elegance, grace manifest, and—

"Don't lean your head back!"

Keith lands on his face.

* * *

 _Two black eyes. I didn't know that was possible._

* * *

Even the intervention of the infirmary can't stop his face from swelling up. He looks like a little raccoon, and the messed up hair doesn't help. The nurse tuts at him and gives him a bag of ice, but judging by the pitying looks they get on the way there and back, Matt comes to one conclusion:

No matter what else happens, Shiro can't see him like that.

* * *

 _And then Shiro rearranged our schedules so we could have lunch with him! So great._

* * *

It goes exactly like Matt envisioned it.

The second Shiro sets eyes on Keith in the cafeteria, his happy-go-lucky boy-waiting-for-his-date attitude melts away. He stands up so fast his chair scrapes, and god—every eye in the room turns to look at him, just in time for him to tip Keith's head back in one giant hand.

Well good. Now the whole Garrison knows about Shiro's hands and Keith's tiny head. Great.

"What happened?" he asks like they're not in the middle of the cafeteria, surrounded by respected peers that they'll have to see again the next day, and every day after.

Matt decides it's not worth. There are some things you don't need to know, some things you can't stop, so he focuses on staring dead ahead and chewing on his sandwich like it's something better than non-fat bologna and plain bread.

Across from their table, one of the kids from his communications class—Derek or Darren or Dave or something—catches his eye and gestures at Shiro and Keith, squinting in the universal expression of _what the fuck is that?_

Matt shakes his head slowly, trying to put all his despair into the gesture. _You don't want to know._ I _don't want to know._ "Hey, can you guys sit down, please, just for me?"

They do, but Shiro pulls Keith's chair out for him first. Christ.

"Who did this?" Shiro asks again, softer, after he's sitting like a normal human and everyone has gone back to eating rather than staring at their table like it's a zoo exhibit.

Keith shoots Matt a panicked look, fiddling with the tablet in his hands. "N-no one?" he stutters. "I fell... down some... stairs...?"

It's worse than the time he tried to lie about parkour, and look where that got them. If there's one thing he could have said to make this worse, somehow, that was it. Shiro's entire demeanor changes. The happy-go-lucky Garrison golden boy is gone, replaced by an entirely new Shiro, and Matt isn't even sure how to catalog this one. It's like his brief two-day bad boy phase on steroids, except instead of wanting a tattoo, he looks like he's ready to throw hands with the next person that looks at Keith wrong.

"The stairs. Someone pushed you down the _stairs._ "

Keith's eyes go wide and he shoots Matt another, more frantic look. "No! No—I tripped."

Shiro isn't buying it. "Keith..."

"My shoelaces were untied."

That would be dumb under normal circumstances, but their eyes all fall to his shoes on an involuntary lizard-brain instinct.

Matt can't see them through the table, but if they're anything like every other pair of Garrison boots in existence, they're zip up. This is a space-age facility—the very walls themselves seem to disdain anything so plebian as shoelaces _._ They don't say so explicitly, but the entire genre of lace-up shoes are probably contraband on Garrison premises.

"Uh, my other shoes have shoelaces..." Keith offers in a voice that's already given up all hope of being believed.

And the whole time he says it, he's staring Matt, begging for help.

Shiro looks between them, and then down at the tablet in Keith's hands, and the little spot between his eyebrows goes crinkly, and no. No, this isn't happening.

"Oh," says Shiro. "I see."

Shiro disappears after lunch without saying goodbye, which is bad. He's not in their next class, which is worse. The sense of foreboding builds into the evening, and Shiro is still a no-show.

When he finally shows, Matt can tell there's something off

"You," he says softly, "could have just told me."

It's terrifying—he's not an angry person, but this is as close as he gets. It's a kind of quiet, condemning rage. Matt hasn't done anything wrong but he feels in the face of Shiro's disappointment that he should be on his knees begging for forgiveness.

But Shiro tosses the papers down like it's _evidence._ "If you liked Keith, you could have said something."

Matt picks up one of the sheets. It's a series of photocopied receipts, courtesy of a florist, for one dozen roses charged to M. Holt—

"No," Matt hears himself gasp. "It's not what it looks like."

Shiro isn't buying it. "I mean, I understand why, but why didn't you just tell me that you guys are—"

"Shiro. I'm straight. I like girls." Even if he liked boys, Keith wouldn't be on that list. He looks like a witch cursed him to cosplay an earless and tailless cat boy for all eternity. One with attitude, at that.

Shiro doesn't say a word, but he raises an eyebrow and nods at the pile of papers.

"I told Katie about his accident and she thought it would be funny to send him flowers. She stole my cred it card." Honesty is the best and only policy. It sounds too ridiculous out loud.

It seems to be the only answer Shiro didn't account for. "Katie?"

"I told her how sad he was. She thought it would—brighten up his day." There's the lie.

But it works. Shiro's glare turns into a frown, and hey, maybe Matt will live through this after all. "Then why did he have your tablet at lunch?"

"He's trying to learn a new—" _just say it, it's just a word,_ "— _parkour_ move. I thought it would help." He leaves out the part where it did the opposite. "What did you think was going on?"

Shiro frowns for another moment, but it's introspective, and then sighs, plopping down on Matt's bed like all his strings are cut. "I don't know," he mutters, burying his face in his hands, muttering something that might be the entire plot of a star-crossed romance straight out of one of the bad comics he grew up reading.

"Ok, look. I'm not mad, but this is driving you nuts." Literally. He's a black hole of bad decisions and embarrassment, and he's dragging down everything in a fifty-foot radius. "You have to decide what you want here. What if he does get a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend?" Neither likely. It's a miracle that two people so uniquely suited to one another would meet in one life. It's like soul mates, but dumber. So much dumber.

* * *

 _I fucked up. I fucked up so bad._

* * *

He realizes his mistake in the silence that follows, because Shiro's face _falls_ , eyes going wide before he closes them, and maybe this really hadn't occurred to him as an eventuality.

"You're right." He buries his head in his hands. Oh god _._ "Keith—he's got his whole life ahead of him. He's going to do something amazing."

Matt pinches the bridge of his nose. "That's not what I meant. At all."

Too little, too late. Shiro stands, coming to some decision, staring off out the window. "He's incredible."

He's incredible at one thing—flying—and that's only when Shiro isn't within touching proximity. But Shiro is beyond logic. He's in a pity spiral, and it's another one of those moments where Matt gets the sense there's a movie soundtrack playing that only Shiro can hear. Something horrible and twangy.

"I'll support him, whatever comes," he says decisively. In sickness and in health, Matt thinks distantly, with only a little sarcasm. Is getting a puppy crush boyfriend or girlfriend a medical condition? It might be, in Shiro's eyes. _I'll support him._

No, no, god no. Matt sees his entire life flash before his eyes, or the next year at least, and it's horrific. He envisions Shiro's stone-faced smile in dozen group shots as some winsome cadet hangs off Keith's arm. It's too unbelievable an image, because Shiro is right there, and the only other human Matt can remember Keith looking at is Shiro.

"Shiro—"

"I think I need to go for a walk. Clear my head a little," Shiro cuts him off, voice tight. He leaves with a speed that suggests he's going to go find somewhere lonely to stare at the stars and pine, maybe pick up a handful of sand and let it slip through his fingers like time and love and Keith.

There's nothing for it.

Matt puts his head down in his pillow and screams _._

* * *

 _They both just really want to be the leads in a bad movie. Like, do you think maybe this is destiny? Maybe they really are dumb soul mates. Maybe that's a thing. They say love isn't real, but maybe this is._

 _See you soon. Also, I finished Iverson's whiskey. If you can steal some of Dad's for me, I'll owe you one (1) favor._

 _\- Matt_


	7. Chapter 7

_Dear Katie,_

 _My life is me, sitting at a table, while an anguished teen rock band plays their full catalog right in front of my salad._

* * *

The eyes are the worst part. Their pain is palpable and they've perfected the subtle art of watching each other on the down low.

A week into Shiro's gallant and questionable decision to stay Just Friends, it's going about as well as could be expected. At lunch, Keith bends over the side of the table to grab a book out of his bag and Shiro's gaze leaps up from his plate, following the progress of Keith's tee shirt where it's riding up over his back and side. Shiro eyes the strip of pale skin with a degree of attention that suggests he's mentally filing it away for future use.

Matt mentally files _that_ away to the corner of his mind he's quarantined for this sort of thing and sworn never to return to.

That night, ten minutes after lights out, Shiro says gently to the dark, "His eyes are violet." Matt doesn't throw a pillow at him because he's only got the one and because that would mean acknowledging that he heard Shiro speak and that now Shiro's Disney fantasy vision will be with him for the rest of his life.

But there's progress. Slow, like the movement of glaciers, lumbering like the gentle whale shark, but there nonetheless. They're almost to the point of being able to look at each other without a distant and anguished guitar rift spinning through Matt's head—almost.

As he watches them the next morning at breakfast, Keith mutters something witty about Harris's class and Shiro laughs and returns something approximating a normal human response.

Matt has to do a double-take. Shiro's still a little red around the ears the way he always is when Keith's paying attention to him and Keith's still a little doe-eyed, but there's nothing intolerably weird about it. It's the first glimmer of hope they've had in days. Matt clings to it with both hands. In the back of his mind, a vision starts to play like a warm summer breeze, limned in light: Shiro and Keith as friends.

Millions of people have conversations every day. There, right before his eyes, Keith and Shiro join their hallowed ranks.

* * *

 _I just want to get through this year. I thought: good. They're going to talk. Whole sentences. I know they can do it—they nerd out about piloting all the time, but in any regular, traditionally human scenario, it all falls apart._

 _Someone should study them._

* * *

His hope lasts right up until the moment Shiro goes to take a sip of water at the exact instant Keith smiles and laughs. Shiro ends up spilling most of it down his front where his uniform is unzipped, exposing his thin white shirt and pectorals to the air and cold water. His face goes red, his shirt goes see-through, and Matt decides he's eaten as much as he's going to—if he stays any longer, he's going to end up throwing most of it up in the back of his mouth.

That sets the mood for the day in ways he can't fully comprehend until later.

Matt doesn't have class with Shiro before lunch, so he doesn't walk with him to the cafeteria. By the time he gets there they're both already seated and Keith is halfway through eating what's unmistakably, tragically, a banana.

To his credit, Shiro is surviving. His eyes aren't fastened on Keith but somewhere on the grey wall over Keith's shoulder. The way they're talking looks like something approximating normal, but up close it's like watching two people try to communicate over a satellite delay.

Matt grabs a plate of something that's hopefully fried rice—a personal favorite, the only bright spot—and pulls up a seat next to Shiro where he'll be in easy kicking distance. Shiro's leg is already jogging up and down under the table in nervous repetition. He's a man on the edge.

"How's class?" Matt asks, trying to set a good example for them.

Keith picks at his banana peel like he's never seen one before in his life and mutters something incomprehensible and a little glum. Under the table, Shiro's leg stops its incessant movement.

"Are people—" Shiro lowers his voice, "—are you being bullied again?"

Two hours since our last nonsense, Matt clocks mentally, trying to shove as much rice as possible into his mouth as quickly as possible. As if Keith couldn't take on his entire class one-handed. Matt overheard a couple of cadets talking about him in the hallway like he was the disciple in one of those terrible old action films, fresh off a childhood of wrestling bears and meditating under waterfalls. Ridiculous, but if he didn't know Keith, if he hadn't watched Keith throw himself at a wall to impress a boy for an amount of time that could be described as dedicated at best, he would be terrified, too.

"No, nothing like that." Keith smiles down at his banana with a look of fondness he probably means for Shiro and picks off a minuscule chunk of it to nibble on.

That's—different. That's not how one traditionally eats a banana, but no judgment. At least that explains why Shiro isn't lying in a pool of his own blood and shattered dignity.

"You know, I've never seen anyone eat it like that," Matt says off-hand.

Keith frowns. "Well—I've never had one before."

It takes a moment for that to process. Keith appears, in rare moments, to be human only in the strictest definition of the word. There are moments when Matt wonders if he's some creation of the Garrison's R and D department, but they'd know. Besides—he's so painfully human the rest of the time. Not knowing what a banana is or how to use a tablet, or repeatedly insisting on some esoteric athletic prowess… None of it really matters when he's laughing at one of Matt's bad jokes or making goo-goo eyes at Shiro. He's doing fine. Still—

"You've never had a _banana_?" Shiro asks, aghast. The situation doesn't really call for that level of drama.

Across the table, Keith seems to realize he's entered lizard-person territory for his own personal level of weirdness and clams up. Matt feels that little sympathetic pang behind his breastbone that's usually reserved for the wet, crunchy sound Keith's body makes when he hits the ground face-first.

Matt kicks Shiro under the table and leans forward a little, trying to catch Keith's eye. "Hey, man, that's cool. They're pretty rare, right?"

Shiro backs him up with a pathetically enthusiastic, "Yeah! Really rare."

They aren't. You could walk into any gas station within a two hundred mile radius of the Garrison and pick one up for a buck at most. By the sour edge to Keith's frown, he knows it.

"Well, how are you supposed to eat it?" he asks, a little tetchy, eyeing the fork next to his plate.

No. No, no. Matt raises an eyebrow and mimes through the proper banana-eating procedure—and realizes his mistake instantly.

There's at least one other gesture that shares that category of hand-to-mouth movement, and even Keith isn't that oblivious.

He laughs. "Really? Isn't that kind of…" He trails off and Matt watches his expression shift as he realizes yes, it is a little lewd—maybe even a _lot_ lewd—but instead of laughing it off, Keith's gaze jerks to Shiro.

No. Not oblivious at all.

Matt sees the moment he decides to ruin everyone's life. It's hard to remember sometimes that Keith is a teenage boy and as capable of bad, thirst-related decisions as any other teenage boy. Matt shakes his head, glaring, trying to convey how bad this will be and how little Matt personally deserves it.

Keith ignores him. "I guess," he says softly, "if that's how you're supposed to eat it." In slow motion, Keith picks up the banana and raises it to his lips. Shiro's leg jerks hard enough to jostle the entire table and Matt can't even be mad.

"Keith, wait—"

He doesn't. He makes dead eye contact with Shiro and shoves the last half of the banana in his mouth.

"Oh god," Matt mutters.

Two things happen. First, Shiro chokes on thin air and starts coughing loud enough to draw attention from the rest of the cafeteria. Second, Keith seems to realize that while a little bit of banana is fine, a lot of banana at once isn't. Shiro is too consumed with his coughing fit to notice, but Matt can't look away. Keith's eyes turn bright and his face goes shock-white.

He's not breathing.

Matt sits up in his chair and flails out a hand at Shiro, trying to get him to shut up—it manages to clock him on the side of the head which is close enough. "Keith? Buddy? You good?"

He doesn't answer but his big eyes are impossibly wide, in full panic—and they're blue, not _violet_. They're a deep, arresting blue, at best. Maybe with a hint of something like deep, lurid not-quite-blue.

Shiro finally realizes there's a more dire situation at hand than his own life-ruining fantasy spot and stands up, rounding the table with the reflexes of an acrobat—unnecessary, completely unnecessary—and kneels down next to Keith where he's going a little blue. Matt can't decide if his own concern outweighs the inevitability of his impending embarrassment. People are already watching; it's probably a wash.

"Do you need help?" Shiro asks, pressing a hand against Keith's shoulder. Keith shakes his head rapid fire—a no by any metric—but he's still not breathing. "Ok," Shiro says. "Ok, I'm going to—"

Keith shakes his head harder, but Shiro already has his arms around Keith's chest, pulling him up out of the chair. Someone gasps.

Out the window of the cafeteria, a small crowd is gathering in the hallway. It's good they chose to sit next to the windows, Matt thinks bleakly. So many good decisions were made.

He puts his head face down on the table. Distantly, he realizes it was always going to come to this: Keith or Shiro at death's door over their three-alarm fire of a non-relationship they've been tending.

* * *

 _You know how you think you've imagined the worst case scenario? Like, you've visualized true fear and nothing can ever really hurt you again? But then you see it manifest and it's so much worse._

 _It was so much worse, Katie._

* * *

"Look." Shiro's voice is anguished.

Matt sighs, rubs his temples, and tries to remember when he thought Shiro was cool.

"I thought he was choking."

Shiro is sitting on a desk in one of the unused classrooms, feet up, hiding his face against his hands—the same position he's been in since he pulled Matt into the room directly post Heimlich Gate. "He _looked_ like he was choking," Shiro moans.

There's no consoling him. The gym at least was private. The simulator was… contained. This was the cafeteria at lunch.

"Do you think—"

"Do I think anyone saw? Yeah. Everyone saw."

"No." Shiro peeks between his fingers. "Do you think he'll forgive me?"

Again, the scene plays before his eyes. Keith's panic and Shiro's noble and desperately misguided attempts at first aid. The—the motion of it.

Abdominal thrusts. That's what they're called. It's rare he has cause to curse his near-perfect memory, but he knows that unwelcome bit of trivia will never leave him now. He'll look at a banana and think _abdominal thrusts._ He'll see Keith bend over and think _abdominal thrusts_. It'll be with him until he dies.

 _Do I think Keith will forgive you for administering a life saving medical procedure on him in front of the entire Garrison?_ The sad, inexorable truth they're all hurtling toward is that no, Keith won't forgive him—because he was never mad in the first place. If pining, if _thirst_ was an Olympic sport, Shiro would have gold, but silver and bronze would go to Keith, hands down.

Matt takes a deep breath and massages his temples for an indulgent moment. "Shiro… I don't think this is gonna work out."

Shiro's head jerks up. All his boyish charm is transformed into something tragic and crestfallen. His hair has always been ridiculous, but suddenly the way it hangs in front of his eyes is inexcusable. _Baby's first crush_ , he reminds himself desperately.

"No, I mean—this just being friends thing. You can't—" _keep your hands off him,_ "—keep this up forever. Do you feel like you like him less? Do you feel like it's working?"

There's a beat while Shiro stares out the window, wistful.

"I have to make it work."

That evening, when they get back to their room, someone's left a banana leaning against the door.

* * *

 _Where's my cute cadet, Katie? Where's my winsome, long-haired beauty with big eyes and a killer smile? I deserve good things. I've worked hard. I've sacrificed so much. Is god real? Does he hate me?_

* * *

Shiro's a dead end. The deadest of ends. He'll admit he has a crush when he's on his deathbed and not a minute sooner. If there's any hope, it lies in Keith's unfailing honesty—or totally shit lying skills, depending on how charitable he's feeling.

Matt's feeling plenty charitable right up until the moment he sees Keith on the roof. He's surrounded by a halo of wistfulness. It's getting darker earlier, so parkour fun hour has been slowly transitioning into limned in sunset pining hour.

Matt decides it's worth it, waving away the miasma of sparkles and bubbles as he sits down next to Keith.

"No practice today?"

Keith picks at the concrete for a moment and then sighs, and fuck, in this light his eyes really are violet. He finally pries a tiny grey pebble loose from the ground and holds it up to the light, considering it like maybe he thinks it resembles the shade of Shiro's eyes. "No," he sighs and lets the stray breeze pull the crumb of rock from his fingers. "I miss him."

There's no question who he means, but the admission takes him aback. Matt can't even pretend he didn't hear, but— "You saw him two hours ago." Keith is the kind of person that wears his heart and most of his other organs on his sleeve, but he doesn't talk about it—he certainly doesn't wax poetic, not even to Matt.

But Keith isn't in the building.

"Do you think... Do you think if he laid down on the ground and flexed his abs he could move like a snake?"

Matt hasn't considered Shiro's abs to any degree, at any point. He's aware of them like he's aware there are probably scorpions out in the desert. You don't go looking, and you hope you'll never see one that close. "Keith... Deeply, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, what the fuck."

"No, just..." Keith picks at the concrete again, trying to pry up another pebble, and now the cloud of whimsy rolling off of him has a manic, dizzy vibe to it. "I mean, if he—if he put a marble on one ab—"

"Keith, I swear to god."

"—could he bounce it? How far? Do you think he could get it to the ceiling?"

Keith smiles at him, bright-eyed, like everything he's just said made perfect sense and was something Matt or any other human on Earth would want to hear. There's something off about it in addition to the words—his eyes aren't focused, and the cast of his skin is pale in the wrong way.

"Are you feeling ok?"

Keith looks him dead in the eye, smiles wider, and then leans over the side of the roof and throws up.

Matt screams, with grace and dignity and valid terror. He doesn't get sick, as a rule; one scratchy throat and he's neck deep in vitamin c and cough syrup. There's absolutely nothing worse than throwing up, and getting sick during exams isn't an option. Getting sick isn't an option.

 _You're being neurotic_ , Katie says, but six years of health don't lie.

He inches close enough to lean over and hover a comforting hand in the vicinity of Keith's back—it doesn't have to touch, right? "You—you good, man?"

In lieu of a response, Keith throws up again. All of Matt retracts into an impermeable psychological snail shell as he goes through the mental gymnastics of assessing how long Keith has been contagious and whether any of the banana he coughed up all over their table at lunch got close enough to be a viable disease vector

"Keith, I'm gonna go get someone to—help, ok?"

Matt leaves before Keith can answer.

* * *

 _So I just kind of eased him down and gave him my jacket and went to get help. It was the right thing to do._

* * *

Running into Shiro is, for once, a blessing in disguise.

"Have you seen Keith?" Shiro asks, which is convenient at least. For a moment Matt balks at the prospect of giving him what he wants, just on principle, but… His fingers itch for the sweet release of hand sanitizer, and Shiro is possibly the only person in the Garrison that would willingly and delightedly handle Keith in his current state.

"Yeah, he's—" Matt tries to put on a concerned face, because he is concerned and deeply, but this is really Shiro's province, "—he's really sick. I was going to get the medics."

Shiro's eyes go wide and then narrow, and he does a thing Matt has never seen him or any human do before in his life. He grits his teeth, visibly, in a next-best approximation of a snarl. Matt physically jerks back. It's like Shiro is in physical pain at the prospect of Keith in danger. God.

"The roof?" Matt offers, like red meat to the tiger Shiro is trying to impersonate.

* * *

 _It's like I got dragged into one of those dramas Mom used to be obsessed with. You know? Like the ones that were just slightly classed up soap operas but the whole time you're going, no one would actually act that way._

 _Well._

* * *

By the time Matt gets to the stairs, Shiro is already halfway down with Keith gathered in his arms, swaddled in Shiro's oversize uniform jacket. Matt thinks he's going to put him down once they get to the bottom, but no such luck.

"He can walk," Matt says two hallways down because Shiro is visibly struggling.

Shiro shoots him a glare and hefts Keith higher in his arms. Fine, Matt thinks, but Shiro's entire uniform is contaminated now— _Shiro_ is contaminated—and he's not that strong, either. Even sad and sick, Keith is upwards of 150 pounds of parkour-honed boy flesh and Shiro might be closer to 200 but of the two of them, Matt's pretty sure Keith would have an easier time deadlifting Shiro in the name of love.

There's sweat on Shiro's brow. Matt decides to forget he noticed and subtly slows a pace so he's a safe distance from patient zero and Shiro's walking daytime-television reenactment.

"You're gonna be fine," Shiro says to Keith, voice tight, arms glistening. There's no reason to sound like that. He literally will be fine, but it's not worth incurring Shiro's tiger wrath, so Matt rolls his eyes and adds it to the tally. Keith isn't complaining.

By the time they get to the infirmary, Shiro is out of breath and Keith looks a little like he regrets keeping up with the facade for so long—but not enough to actually walk and lose their full body contact. The problem, Matt's beginning to see, is that Keith has cunning. He's can't lie outright worth a damn, but he can edge and obfuscate toward his desires with enough deftness to ruin a life or two.

Or three.

In the infirmary, Shiro lays him down on a bed with the utmost care, going so far as to push Keith's hair off his forehead and check his temperature with the back of his hand, and then the front for good measure. Keith's eyes don't quite flutter shut, but they do go suspiciously half-lidded.

The medic watches them both with a look Matt feels in his soul. They make briefest eye contact and the medic shakes his head. "Shirogane. I can handle it from here."

Shiro squeezes Keith's hand and steps away. "You're gonna be fine," he says again, voice still tight. The medic raises an eyebrow, and it feels good to be validated like that. In the end, Shiro leaves willingly, but he lingers in the hallway, worry rolling off of him still.

Matt takes pity on him. "Dude, he really is going to be fine. He's young and strong and—you know, all that stuff."

"What if it's flu?" Shiro asks, but he says _flu_ like it's synonymous with _consumption_ and he's the dashing lord in a period drama whose fiance has been hospitalized for a mysterious cough. He says it like he thinks Keith won't live out the season.

Matt shakes his head. Give him an inch, and he takes a mile.

"If it's flu then you better burn your clothes before you get back to our room," Matt says and leaves him in the hallway.

* * *

 _It wasn't flu._

 _Did you know that a person can be allergic to bananas? I didn't. I didn't know that was a thing. I still don't know that that's a thing._

 _It goes without saying, but I'm taking the first offworld assignment I can get when I graduate. The only upshot is that they'll both be gone by the time you get here. I guess you'll have to trace their legacy in the faint scent of banana on the wind when the AC in the cafeteria blows just right._

 _I'm so sorry._

 _— Matt_


	8. Chapter 8

_Dear Katie,_

 _The banana thing was really unfortunate._

* * *

"He almost died, Matt."

It's the third time he's said it in an hour. He keeps muttering it to himself, softly. _He could have died._ There's something revelatory in it. Matt is beyond the naive hope that Shiro will have some epiphany and sweep Keith into his arms, but it's something. It's a step in the right direction. Or a shuffle. Maybe—a cagey glance around the corner toward the right direction.

A side-eye, at least.

"I know, buddy." It's not seven yet. Shiro set an alarm and got up on time for the first time in known history so they could meet Keith in the infirmary. He was kept overnight for "observation" though Matt privately thinks it was an excuse to get Shiro out of the room. Visiting hours aren't a thing in a two-room nurse's office. "Imagine if you'd let him eat that entire banana..."

The word banana is tainted now with a residue of embarrassment and visceral disgust, but it's worth saying just to see Shiro's face go comically serious. He's going to have a permanent crinkle between his brows from this incident.

"Keith…"

Matt shoves him in the back. If they get done with this fast enough, they can get first dibs on the pastries the Garrison pretends don't come pre-wrapped in plastic and thrown in a toaster for ten minutes before they put them out. Beggars can't be choosers, and Matt has been begging now for a while—for anything. Anything good.

Before they can get to the door of the infirmary, Keith steps out. No—the medic shoves him out, hand barely visible on Keith's shoulder before the door slams shut behind him. A mood Matt can relate to as Shiro slides into Keith's space without any notion he comprehends normal social norms like personal space.

He cups Keith's face in both hands, runs his thumbs over Keith's cheekbones. "Feeling better?"

Keith smiles at him—and just him. The rest of the hallway—Matt, _just_ Matt—is gone in whatever sparkle-haze they've built a little picket-fence house of platonic love in. "Yeah. Tons. Are _you_ ok?"

It's like they survived the wreck of the _Titanic_ together and not an ill-fated lunch and mild case of allergy-related food poisoning.

"Of course," Shiro says. The inflection is wrong. It's more, _of course, nothing will ever hurt me as long as I have you_ and less, _of course, all I did was incorrectly administer abdominal thrusts to your person and carry you down a flight of stairs we both know you could have walked_. He ruffles Keith's hair before he lets go and steps away. Matt tried that once and almost got his hand bitten off, but Keith doesn't mind if it's Shiro, evidently. Maybe it's related to hand size. "We'll see you later, ok?"

Keith nods and Shiro watches him go with a look so sweet it makes Matt feel sticky by proximity. He tries not to notice Shiro's gaze slip down. The cadet uniforms are notoriously ugly and the butt-area leaves everything to the imagination, but then, Shiro has a good one.

"...Did you really get us up before six so we could escort him to the hallway?"

* * *

 _This is too much time with them. Look—everyone at the Garrison is a nerd. Shiro and his one-boy-disaster aren't different. They're just the gym variant. It doesn't make them better, Katie._

 _It just makes them sweaty._

* * *

There's a burning question that Matt needs an answer to.

"How did you not know you were allergic?"

They're in the gym after lunch because Matt has a free hour and ironically, things get pretty quiet around Keith and Shiro. They have trouble talking to each other about things that aren't simulation scores and flight tactics and it's the kind of thing Matt has years of practice tuning out. And no one else wants to step into their space after Bananagate. The gym is a ghostland.

Keith's on the treadmill, hair tied back, soaked in sweat but only because he has it set to incline. Matt can't look directly at him. It's like watching the terminator run. "I dunno," he says. "I guess my Dad knew..."

Next to him, Shiro drops his weight—actually drops it, and not on purpose. It misses his toes by an inch or two and Matt's not sure if he would have preferred it fall on him. "That's—I didn't know you had parents."

"Everyone has parents, Shiro." Matt takes a breath and flips his notes open while Shiro un-casts Keith in his mental production of _Little Orphan Annie_. He looks shaken, like it honestly hadn't occurred to him that Keith _had_ parents at some point and lost them. Matt wishes he'd known. Matt wishes he'd had the chance to tell Shiro that Keith's parents left him before he was born. Joy is so hard to come by.

He doesn't respond immediately, sitting on the bench with the weight rack. "How young were you?" he asks finally, in an admirable show of self-control.

Keith cuts the treadmill. "I don't remember. I just—" he looks down, feet walking out the last few feet as the treadmill slows, "—I miss him. Sometimes."

Again, Shiro thinks before speaking. He considers the weight above him like it's the weight of life's sorrows on Keith's shoulders and if only he could lift it… No, enough.

Either way, it's probably more than he can handle. He's lifting without a spotter, again. The need to impress Keith is omnipresent and Shiro isn't above it. He's been peacocking for weeks and this is just the final form of that, Matt realizes. Shiro lifting Keith was step one. Shiro lifting twice Keith's weight in dumbbells— _barbell Matt, it's called a barbell_ —is the second. If Keith is impressed, he's doing a good job of hiding it.

"I just remember it was after my birthday. I miss that."

This is it. Matt puts down his notes, slowly. This is Shiro's moment. Against all odds, through the most circuitous and ridiculous route possible, Shiro found a way to Keith's tragic backstory. Matt sends a prayer to whatever god has yet to abandon them that this won't go poorly, that Shiro will find the strength to not mess this up somehow. It's a dark forest crowded with pining and pitfalls and possible mistakes and thirst traps, but new life wells up in Matt—new hope. Shiro isn't the best pilot of his generation for nothing. He can do this.

Shiro meets Matt's eyes, aware and panicked, before his gaze darts back to Keith. Lying flat on a gym bench probably isn't the best place for this conversation, but maybe that's what works for them. "Birthday?" he asks, with something that could almost be mistaken for nuance and tact, but more likely is the unfortunate way his eyes have caught on Keith and Keith's hands brushing the stray hairs off his forehead—the sweat that's beaded there.

It says a lot that he now sees this for the accidental seduction it is. Only between them—a private language written in sweat and blood, on gym mats and concrete roofs. Two people so disgusting in love meet each other once every millennium. Matt is rooting for them if only because there's no one else they could possibly end up with that would understand this and it would be cruel to expose any other living individual to their brand of romance.

Keith looks at Shiro, smiles. "Yeah. Cake and stuff. I don't remember much, but—I know we had cake." His voice gets tight at the end. It's painful and sweet.

There's nothing to say to that. Shiro is frozen, staring straight up at the barbell on the rack above him while the rusty wheels of his Keith Brain try to turn in tandem with his regularly functioning A Student brain—and then he turns.

Again, instead of looking at Keith, Shiro stares at Matt, dead-on. Matt feels like an emotional support animal. It's the insistent kind of look that requires eye contact. Matt looks away, but he shakes his head. No. Whatever this is—no.

Shiro cocks his head, eyebrows going up at the edge of Matt's vision. _Look at me. Look._ Matt shakes his head again. Shiro nods at him, more insistent, twists his head further.

Fuck it. Matt looks.

Shiro mouths something incomprehensible—no words Matt recognizes, at least.

Matt squints. _What?_

Shiro repeats it, slower, jerking his head in Keith's direction. Keith is doing stretches now, smiling softly to himself. Matt cocks his head at Shiro, and Shiro rolls his eyes before he enunciates the same silent, nonsensical sentence. It might be a question.

Before Matt can express that he still has no idea what the fuck Shiro wants beyond the obvious and pathetic, Shiro makes the fatal mistake of glancing at Keith. He does a predictable double take and settles his gaze on the length of Keith's thighs where he's doing finger-to-toe stretches. The Galaxy Garrison issue leggings cling to his legs in a way that can't be regulation and man—he is flexible.

"Are those parkour stretches?" Shiro asks, the picture of grace and comfort.

And just like that, Shiro's brief moment of redemption comes crashing down around them. It's a double blow because Keith looks up at him and Shiro chooses that moment, of all moments, to try and lift the weight again. Only because Keith is watching.

Maybe, Matt thinks faintly, Shiro's brain isn't connected to his muscles anymore. It would make sense. Maybe his body wants Keith in a different way than his mind does and they can't connect into one cohesive wooing machine. Tragic, Matt thinks, watching the weight begin to slip out of Shiro's sweaty fingers, the horror in Shiro's eyes, the grim tableau of his impending doom. He brought it on himself.

It's made slow by the fact that Shiro tries to stop it, but once it starts to go, it's gone, and he's only delaying the inevitable. Matt's too far away to do anything so he doesn't bother to try. Rest in peace, Shiro.

Keith is too far, too, but—suddenly he isn't. Keith's eyes go wide and then he _blurs_ across the ten feet separating him and Shiro. It's the fastest Matt's ever seen a human move and the nearest thing to panicked he's ever seen Keith in their mutual friendship. He plucks the weight out of Shiro's hands the exact instant Shiro loses full control of it.

No one moves.

There's Keith, standing above Shiro, holding the weight in one hand in the air, breathing hard, eyes wide, and Shiro below him, arms still outstretched. Keith hefts the weight to the side, lets it fall the floor harmlessly.

"Are you ok?"

* * *

 _You know like how a mother can lift a car off her child? Or a boy can carry another boy down a flight of stairs if he's been seduced by said boy's hair and uncanny ability to eat a piece of fruit in a way that gets said fruit banned from the cafeteria? Beautiful. Love is real, Katie._

* * *

Shiro's jaw works. He makes a little croak—something of the initial terror still playing across his face as he stares up at Keith. "Y—" He swallows. " _Y—_ "

Matt can hear his heart racing from across the room. Keith looks about as shaken. "What?" he asks, between scared and defiant.

"Y—you're so _strong_." Shiro rolls off the bench, eyes glued to Keith in terrible wonder. He steps toward Keith, still half-crouched, almost trance-like.

"No, I'm—I'm not." He folds his arms, but that doesn't stop Shiro from stumbling another step toward him, grabbing his biceps, and even from across the room in his rictus of old, tired dread, Matt can see the way Keith blushes. He goes painfully red, painfully fast, and then Shiro pulls one of his arms free and cradles it in both hands like it's some lost treasure unearthed.

He half-turns to Matt, Keith's arm delicately in hand, and the wonder in his eyes has morphed into something manic with joy. _Hey Matt, look at Keith's arm, isn't this as fascinating to everyone else as it is to me? I'm sure this isn't a niche interest._ "That was _two hundred pounds_ and he just—"

Always the gym, Matt thinks. All the worst things in his life spawn from this gym.

Shiro pushes up the sleeve of Keith's t-shirt, stroking the skin and muscle there. He looks seconds from dispensing with the shirt altogether. "Wow," he mutters to himself—and the room. His voice is a touch too low, his cheeks red in a way that can't be excused by his failed attempt at bench pressing and consequent fear. " _Wow._ "

Keith looks frozen—deer in the headlights, but the headlights are Shiro's hands, and he's looking at Matt over Shiro's shoulder with a level of desperation that Matt's come to associate with the other students in his theoretical physics class at the exact moment they get handed a test and have to decide if it would be better to fake an emergency or take the F.

Matt's not sure what the equivalent of an F is in this scenario, but Keith is seconds from that decision and he doesn't have a great track record under pressure. A sudden vision comes to Matt, unbidden—a second lie.

A second parkour.

* * *

 _Desperation is the mother of invention. That's the saying, right? I want to die._

* * *

"I—Iverson." Matt says, too loud in the quiet, the words tripping out of his mouth. It's nonsensical, pathetic, the only word that can serve as anathema. They're not vampires, but this level of thirst can't be completely human either.

They spring apart, both of them turning back to Matt and the door, wide-eyed.

"Thought I heard him," Matt says faintly. He can't tell if they buy it or not, but that's beside the point. Their hands, on each other, in front of Matt, isn't something he can handle. It's not that it's gross—more, it's the unfulfillment. The knowledge that they can be sweating and all over each other and then privately confess five minutes later, _I don't think he likes me._

* * *

 _I know you're still young. I just hope that one day when you find someone you love, you have the courage to tell them._

* * *

It comes to a head that night. Matt avoids the two of them and takes dinner in the library because the librarian likes him and gave him the off-hours codes, ostensibly so he could study in off hours. In practice, it's his haven.

He lets the quiet lull him into a sense of calmness and tolerance. And false security, it turns out. His sense of serenity lasts for the entire walk from the library to their room, right up until the moment he steps in the door.

Shiro is in the shower. Matt knows because he left the door open. Matt knows because he can hear.

 _Keith._ It's a one syllable name in theory only. In practice, Shiro manages about three before his voice cuts out. Matt can't move from his place by the door. His feet won't physically rise. He should leave, immediately, forget this happened—or try, god, _try_ —and preserve the dignity of one of them, at least, but then there's another low moan.

"Kei—"

" _Shiro_." The name tears out of him like a bullet in reverse. His mom walked in on him once. Neither of them will ever forget it, but the sound of his own voice sends him right back to that moment—the visceral terror, the weight of shame, the disgust.

He needs to send her an edible arrangement. No—two edible arrangements.

The sound cuts off, followed by the water. Shiro slinks out after a moment, dripping mortification and water all over the carpet, towel slung around his waist in a mockery of shame. He's a specimen, to be sure, and the worst thing Matt has ever seen.

"I—I thought you were getting back later."

It's not an excuse. It's not a reason. Matt would feel better if he'd lied upfront. This is, he realizes, a pattern of behavior. It's expected, and it's expected that you will never expose your roommate to it. Matt thought they were all operating under the same unwritten rules of basic human courtesy, but this is a new world. No rules, no reservations. Shiro's been scheduling. He's been doing this for—for weeks.

Don't ask, he tells himself.

"Have you been doing that the entire time?" The words slip out, broken already.

Shiro gives him a look that says both _what did you expect_ and _his legs, Matt, they're so long and lithe and sultry_. He's looks beseeching. He looks like a man begging for mercy at the chopping block even as he critiques the executioner's shoes.

* * *

 _You never know how bad it'll get if you don't come clean. Things escalate, you know? You're not the only one affected._

* * *

Later in the shower, it comes back to him. A combination of factors make it painfully hard to ignore. There's still steam on the mirror. The tile under his feet is warm and it inspires the same feeling as sitting on a toilet seat that's been pre-heated by someone else. You know what's happened there, but everyone agrees not to think about it, and suddenly he can't suspend that sense of disgust. By far the hardest part is when his brain steps forward and very politely taps on his shoulder and asks, _Where? Where was Shiro standing?_

Their father taught them the mind of a scientist was a gift. Matt's never had cause to doubt it until that moment. The angle and velocity of the sound waves based on the relative density of surrounding surfaces, the echo he caught on the tail end of Keith's name—

Drawn like a moth to a dirty, horrible flame, his eyes find the suspect corner, and then slowly, inexorably, his math brain supplies, _hey, you know what, that's the wall that faces the gym_.

* * *

 _I mean, sure there's a risk the person you love won't reciprocate, but think about the people around you._

* * *

There are stall showers in the cadet dorms.

They're not ideal, but they'll serve in Matt's time of need. He has fond memories of wondering how, in the twenty-second century, at the most advanced science and tech facility on Earth, a shower could run cold. The cadet showers find a way.

He steals a change of clothes from his dresser and a towel he's sure Shiro has never touched (and hopefully never looked at) from the cabinet in the bathroom and walks out like he's not about to hoof it all the way to the cadet wing in pursuit of an untainted shower experience. Shiro doesn't look up from his tablet. He has his headphones in and only God knows what he's watching. Only God can punish him for it.

* * *

 _Think about them, Katie. Think about Other People. Just spare one (1) second for their pain._

* * *

The hallways are empty, but the locker room… isn't. Foreboding passes over him as soon as he sees the six boys gathered inside. He hadn't counted on having to wade through a gaggle sweaty cadets to get to a shower, but he's seen worse.

Matt nods at them and heads for the showers, but a quiet voice stops him.

"No—dude. Don't go in there." A cadet in a towel stands, putting a hand out to him. He's big—bigger than Matt, maybe bigger than Shiro, with eyes that Matt trusts immediately and unconditionally. Big, brown, like the sweetest, warmest dog Matt's ever met. "Just trust me." He closes his beautiful eyes "It's not worth it."

Matt trusts this man with his life.

"Why?" Matt whispers.

He doesn't answer, but his friend does. He looks vaguely familiar, but Matt can't place him. "Because of—"

That's the second he hears it. Soft, and unmistakable. More so because it's the second time he's heard it that night. Everyone in the room freezes. The man in front of Matt looks up at the ceiling, cheeks coloring. "Yeah. Uh. That."

 _That_ is someone getting off in the showers, and they're not being quiet about it.

"Sh—" The single syllable cuts out in a moan. Whoever it is, they're too close to the entrance to be doing that. This is why the cadet showers suck, he remembers. This is why he will never know peace.

They wait. The sound is over-loud in the quiet. It leaves nothing to the imagination. "You guys have Harris for calc, right? How's that going?" asks Matt, in desperation.

"Oh! Great!" says the big guy, smiling like Matt's just saved his life. "I really love the way he—"

"Bad," his friend, interrupts like it's Matt's fault.

"Shi— _aaah_ ," says whoever is desecrating the showers. It cuts off on a groan that has to be fake. They have to be faking. They have to be doing this to ruin lives. There's no other explanation.

It's the longest three minutes of Matt's life. Occasionally someone works up the gumption to talk, but it feels rude and it feels like an acknowledgment that they're listening to someone do— _that_. By the time the shower turns off, Matt's settled on a bench beside the big cadet, mentally rewriting equations for transitive motion at different gravitational accelerations. Anything— _anything_ but that sound.

It somehow never occurs to him that there's a worst-case scenario. It somehow never occurs to him that he's living it.

Keith walks in from the showers, dripping wet and red and utterly without shame. He spares them a narrow glance like he's in a position to judge them for sitting around to listen to his one-man show, and it's a sudden window into a Keith he's never seen first hand. Best in his class. Willing and ready to occupy an entire shower for his own time and thirst.

He's a menace. Keith is a menace. Or maybe, Matt realizes the moment they make eye contact, he didn't know that doing that at volume was against etiquette and is realizing it right then. Understanding grows in the space between them, a little garden of sorrows. Keith blinks at him. Matt tries to smile, but the signal stutters on the way to his mouth. The most he can manage is a tight-lipped, flat parody of a grin, lips twitching under the Herculean effort of maintaining eye contact and not frowning or gagging.

Keith's eyebrows go up. Matt jiggles his head side to side, exposing his teeth half by accident. Yes, we heard. Yes, _I_ heard. Everything.

Understanding dawns.

Keith's eyes go wide, and Matt is forced to watch as his gaze falls to the locker room's other inhabitants, one by one, more horrified with each shared look. Everyone is trying their luck with the same expression Matt is starting to get scared will pull a muscle in his face and stick there permanently—the universal thin-lipped smile of barest courtesy. Everyone is wearing it, except the boy with the attitude. He's given in to the frown. It's not a good look for him.

That's what shakes Keith out of it. He sneers at the boy, and, like some savannah cat brushing off flies, raises his head and visibly dismisses the situation. It's a skill Matt would give anything to learn.

"Hey, Matt." He nods and spares a glance for everyone else like he can't imagine why they're there and undressed and then he walks to his locker, dresses in curt motions, and walks out the door.

No apology, no shame.

Everyone turns to Matt, and he realizes that Keith's acknowledgment of his existence was also Keith gently, carefully sliding him under the nearest cargo bus. There's betrayal in the friendly cadet's big, lovely eyes. Matt wants to take his hand and apologize, explain the situation, but there's no fixing this. Not for them, not for him.

"Yeah, I'll just—" Matt stands, motions to the showers, "—go.

* * *

 _They say love can drive you crazy, but I didn't think it was a transitive thing. I really need to come home for a few days. It's just too much._

 _I love you and I promise you if you ever make their mistakes, I'll have to take you down. It's in the sibling code. I'm updating it. It's a matter of honor at this point. If you see someone you like, you need to run up to them immediately, take their hand, look dead in their eyes, and tell them they're beautiful. Please, just do this for me. Do this for your brother._

 _— Matt_


End file.
